Veniversum
by Dr. Patience's Secretary
Summary: Takes place in the years between escape from Larkhill and the day before V meets Evey. Some funny parts, mostly a play on the "For every action there is an equal and opposing reaction" theme. Tries to shed light on the reclamation period.
1. Chapter 1

_*Author's note: This Fic is based off the events in the movie, not the graphic novel. I did this (a) not to spoil the novel for those who haven't read it and (b) because more people have seen the movie than have read the novel._

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_"Bombs have been made with fertilizer as long as they've been making bombs."_

- V for Vendetta: From Script to Film, Spencer Lamm

For every action there is an equal and opposing reaction. Basic law of the universe. Yin and yang, some might call it. Where there is a shadow, there must be a light.

So, when a scarred, vengeance-bent vigilante is on the streets with the appetite for blood, somewhere in the universe there must be a reflection, a healing light that likewise wanders the streets, acting as a counter-weight against the violence. One harms, one heals, and balance is maintained.

**Veniversum**

Chapter One.

Getting burned alive wasn't _exactly _part of the plan. In retrospect they figured out it must have been a natural gas line somewhere in the building that amplified the already-flammable facility. But, whatever the cause, that night some emergency burn treatment was in demand.

"Jesus H. Christ! What happened to him?" The male EMT that leapt from the back of the back of the ambulance had seen burns, but this was more like a roast duck.

"Smoking kills," replied Ms. Carson, who helped lift the body on to the stretcher.

"Can't let you in here, I'm afraid," said a woman EMT.

"It's all right, I'm a registered nurse," said Ms. Carson as she followed them into the back of the ambulance. She quickly flashed a plastic identification card. "And," she added suddenly, "I'm his sister."

"A'right get in!" said the first medic. The truck doors slammed shut and the vehicle sped into the dark with sirens blaring. It should be noted that the black smoke they left behind was not (as the educated reader might have guessed) from a building at Larkhill, but instead from one in the town of Durrington. This abandoned home went up in flames the same night as the fated Larkhill detention facility, which met its fate less than half an hour before the ambulance answered a call for a house fire on 32 Willow Drive, Durrington.

"We're nearly to the hospital," the male medic assured Ms. Carson.

"I know," she replied, looking out the back widow, watching the sirens light up the dead trees. The body, his burned, scarred body, was covered in a white sheet up to his jaw and they had him on oxygen, but she didn't want to look at him. She had this nagging, anxious feeling that he might have _let_ the fire catch him. It's so like him, she thought.

The hospital came upon them like a giant mouth with fluorescent teeth, swallowing the ambulance whole. A rush of rubber hands and voices swept Ms. Carson and his burns down a white tunnel. When his burns disappeared behind a double doors at last, Ms. Carson turned around to face the authorities and became Ms. McGuiness.

"Andrew McGuiness," she told them. "He has a drinking problem, and he smokes."

A young man in scrubs with a clip board wrote everything down from his seat behind the glass.

"How did you find him?"

"He left the house in a fit, which happens some times, but usually he comes back after a few hours. It was 11:30, I think, and he hadn't come back yet, so I left to look from him. I only went to the fire because, well, it was a fire and I worried it was him. I guess I was right."

"Where do you live?"

"Durrington," she replied.

"Alone?"

"With my fiancée."

"How long?"

"A hundred years."

The man in the scrubs paused and looked up at her. He was young and fresh, sort of spunky.

"I almost wrote that down, you know!" he laughed a little.

Ms. Carson just raised her eyebrows slowly and stared at him.

"Sorry," he muttered after a moment. "We have to ask that," he added. "Protocol and all."

"It's all right," she replied. She went on to give him a fake address to match the fake phone number, as well as the fake names and fake dates of birth. In three years and two months, the first publicly-available thumbprint identification systems would be released.

It took him a while to get his vision back. His eyes were the last thing to heal. But he wasn't in the hospital when he opened his eyes again. He had stayed there only as long as it took the doctors there to stabilize him.

When he could finally see again, he found himself in a dark bedroom, clearly a guest room based on its sparse decoration. He was alone, bandaged all over. He was in pain; the pain never seemed to stop, it just subsided from time to time. He wasn't sure the time or the day, but it didn't matter. His world had become a routine of drifting in and out of sleep, waking only when he needed to eat or relive himself. Ms. Carson always there frequently, helping him to eat and tending his wounds, but she wouldn't answer his questions about the outside world. His one request that she refused to honor was the morning paper.

"They really did believe I was your sister," she told him one night as she went through the process of changing the bandages on his arms.

"But you don't look a thing like me," he replied in his usual witty way.

"No, I don't look like lasagna."

He exhaled sharply through his nose in response.

"You're not very compassionate for a nurse," he said after a moment.

"Sorry," she said immediately. Then added, "But, after what you did, I think you deserve to be called a lot worse than lasagna."

"Not," he returned immediately, "worse than what they deserve…"

"That's all you ever think about, isn't it?" she asked as she applied the new bandages over the burns.

"No, not all," he defended himself. "Sometimes I think about gardening."

Ms. Carson sat back and looked at him with her brow lowered, shaking her head slightly.

"What?" he shrugged, trying not to wince. "I do. But I suspect their foul bodies would make a poor fertilizer."

That made Ms. Carson shudder sharply.

"Bad image, bad image," she breathed, taking off her sterile gloves and opening the door to leave.

Just before she turned the light off, he was able to get a good look at her for the first time since before the fire. His vision was a bit blurry, but she still had the same sharp features and critical eyes. Her curly red hair was stilled tied tightly behind her head in a long pony tail, and she still stood with her shoulders back and chin up like the proud commander of an army. As always she was dressed almost entirely in white, though it looked more like she was on her way to play golf than work in a hospital.

"Are you going to work?" he asked before she closed the door.

"No, I'm taking a break. I fear I might be sleeping on a cot there before long."

"Why's that?"

She paused and thought about her answer.

"No reason," she lied, and closed the door.


	2. Chapter 2

Veniversum

Chapter 2.

The lie couldn't go on much longer, of course.

"You recovered _unusually_ fast," Ms. Carson told him the first day he was able to walk through the house fully dressed.

"I seem to have a knack for it," he said, turning his salami-patterned hand over once. It was then that he spotted the remote for the television, though it looked like it hadn't been touched in years.

"What are you doing?" she asked sharply. Her voice was small and distant coming through the phone.

"Nothing," he lied like a disobedient school boy

He turned on the television and quickly switched to the BTN.

"I swear, you're like a child some days!"

There was a long, unsettling silence. At the hospital, Ms. Carson stood with a mask and plastic goggles covering her face and an ear to the phone. She could hear talking on the other line, but couldn't distinguish any words.

"What is that?"

There was no reply for a few more moments. Then, finally.

"Speaking of children," he said slowly in his deep, somewhat eerie tone, "how's work been lately?"

"God, I knew I should have thrown that thing out!" She cursed herself for keeping a television she never watched. With the cat out of the bag, so to speak, she released an exasperated sigh. "Well, you'd have to find out sooner or later. Don't worry, it won't affect us. You're the cure and we were all immunized…"

There was another long silence. She knew he was just watching, unblinking, putting the pieces together in his head.

"Look," she said after a few more moments, "try not to-" But she was cut off before she could finish.

Ms. Carson's first reaction was to return to the flat immediately and put a stop to whatever he was undoubtedly going to do. That is until the hospital doors flew open and two new patients were rushed in. The building was over-crowded as it was and many of the staff had fallen ill. Ms. Carson's soul sometimes felt like a bloated tick, burdened with the cries of dying children, the grasping fingers of mothers-no-longer, and the sight of this incurable disease.

The phone line was already dead, but for just a moment she wanted to neglect her duty.

"I have to get back to work," she said to the dial tone. "You know, I know how this all started, too. I was there, too. You think you have some right because you think you're alone, but I was there. I was just on the other side of the glass." She paused and looked around the room at the bone white walls. "It's not the death that gets to me so much: It's that I know there's _already a cure_. Does knowing that hurt more? I've never been burned badly, but I think my hell is just as dark as yours sometimes…but maybe that's just me."

One recently disconnected phone call away, in a flat with a box of sterile hand wipes in every other room, the man from room five realized he'd crushed the phone in his hand. He'd been wearing an oven mitt so the plastic shards didn't cut his palm.

The television continued its montage of dead children and spreading plague. It hadn't taken him long to put the puzzle together, and in an equal amount of time he once more reassembled the list of names in his head.

"Prothero, Lilliman, Sutler, Creedy. Prothero, Lilliman, Sutler, Creedy."

Over and over again the names of four horsemen ran through his head and one by one he began to add new names. He added the names of doctors and technicians, of security guards and politicians. Everyone who had been involved, everyone who had sat by and let the atrocities rage on like an unchecked wildfire, no matter their motivation or intentions, he added them to his list.

He didn't remember his parents or any of his family, nor his home town or birthday. He remembered none of his life before. If he tried to remember his mother's name, all he could hear was _Creedy_, and if he tried to recall where he went to school, all he could think of was _Prothero._ It was a bizarre state of existence, and he half wondered if obliterating those names wouldn't make room for what used to be there.

The television showed the hospital where he knew Ms. Carson worked and that she currently spent most of her time at.

And in an hour he was there, walking through the front doors with a mask over his face, his collar pulled up, a hat over his head and sunglasses at night. He'd overheard her on the phone a few days earlier, so he knew where to look for her. Security was tight in the hospital, but nothing running along side a gurney couldn't get a man past. She was easy to spot on account of her height. She was nearly as tall as him, if not equal.

"You made a proactive effort to save us," he said clearly, walking up behind her.

She jumped visibly, shocked to encounter him here, at this strange hour of the morning.

"Dear God you scared me!" she hissed, walking up to him quickly.

"You didn't stand by idly and I know you did everything you could with placebos and morphine, and I know I couldn't have escaped on my own, much less survived…"

"What?" she snapped, glancing left and right. He had recovered long before he admitted to it, she realized. She wouldn't have left him alone if she thought he was so able. "You shouldn't be here, how did you even get in? Someone here might recognize your… your voice."

"Why, is there anyone here I know?"

"I-" Ms. Carson cut herself off instantly. She could hear his intentions in his voice. She then realized with a stab of horror that she'd subconsciously looked directly at one of the technicians who'd worked at Larkhill. Many of them who survived the fire were sent to work at this hospital on account of their immunity to St. Mary's.

And he saw the technician, too. And recognized him.

"You've done so much for me," he said quickly in his most eloquent voice. "But I'm afraid our paths part here and I doubt I will ever be able to repay you. Good bye, Ms. Carson."

On that he turned sharply and walked right up behind the technician. There people nurses and patients in the hall, families gathered around dying children under plastic tents, and electronic witnesses, too.

This technician was the first name he crossed of his list. For the poison this person helped to create and the evil he willingly partook in, his body slumped to the floor in a pool of red and a glistening scalpel. The energy of the hall way shifted at the sound of Ms. Carson's cry of outrage, but he, the villain, was gone. It was like they had shone a light on a shadow in their attempts to catch it.

Ms. Carson watched him vanish down the hallway, whipping between standing bodies with the fluid movements of smoke. She remembered how he'd sworn his vengeance against every soul at Larkhill, but she never actually believed he'd follow through. And yet, it had already begun.

And it would continue, for twenty more years, until all but a handful of names had been scratched off the list that was burned into his brain. In that time he would one by one pick out those he held accountable.

"But, I knew it wouldn't be limited to those names alone," Ms. Carson would admit years later. "It would be anyone who stood in his way, too. That's why I had to follow him."


End file.
